RD:      Can you briefly describe your work?

KN:     Well, I consider myself a medium, and I don’t necessarily like the term of psychic, because a medium is more like one who has the ability to connect with the past, and a psychic predicts the future, but I do get- when I am doing a reading as a medium, info on the future, but because of the whole psychic friends network thing, its gotten a negative connotation now, that I am a fortune teller- I don’t use cards.  I do use crystals but that is more for the energy.  I work with the energy flow. I am the one that someone would go to for closure, like “I never got to say goodbye to my aunt”, that type of stuff, and my job as a medium in the ghost hunting group is to find out who is making the racket, who is there banging the pots and pans around and why.  I started playing with my abilities when I was 11 or 12 after my grandmother had passed in an alcohol related accident, which was unexpected, coming home from work, she was dead on the scene, and being an eleven year old who was really close to my grandparents, it was my way of seeking closure, to try and contact her and the first few times when I did make contact with her, it freaked the daylights out of me, because the energy would come in so strong and I wasn’t used to the energy- you’ll hear me mention energy a lot, because that’s the way I work, with different fields of energy.

RD:      So when you feel something coming thru, is it a voice, you feel an energy, or a presence enter you?

KN:     It’s really all of the above, I hear- I’m clairvoyant, I get a lot of symbols and imagery, and I’m also clairsentient, meaning I feel the energy- I feel when I’ve been touched, I’ve been talked to audibly, as well as- and this sounds really bad- I hear voices in my head, but they are real faint voices and its really hard sometimes because you have to really focus. Sometimes its associated with symbols- you see for instance, and I’m taking this from one of my readings today- like I’ll see a cow and hear the word grandpa, and you’ll have to link A and B and say, was your grandpa into dairy farming, so really its tuning in all your senses at the same time. And learning to work in your niche.  You’ve got the voices coming in, and a lot of people dismiss those voice in your head as nothing more than that- I’m going crazy hearing voices, but if you’re thinking about them, and you’re hearing it clear as day- I mean I hear my grandmothers voice clear as day to this day still and its been 20 years since she passed, I mean yeah that could be considered memory, but a lot of times it really isn’t, it depends on the situation you’re in.  It’s all about intuition or gut feeling

RD:      What there anything that sparked your interest when you were a kid or did it start with the contact?

KN:     Well I was always that young child who went right to the paranormal section in the library- you know the UFOs the poltergeists, the ghosts- and was really always intrigued. I thought it was really cool, like - I’m really dating myself, the show “That’s Incredible”, or you know where they would have a haunted house and the people would see the telephone move, or interactions where the remote would turn. I always thought that was really cool. And I would always sit there in the church or classroom and I was always trying to get stuff to move, unsuccessful of course, so as I grew up I was always very spiritual and introverted. I never fit in or felt like I was different somehow, so I could never accept the fact that once we die, that’s it.  You know everything else is a cycle- using the sunflower as an example, a sunflower produces seeds, you plant the seeds and the flower comes back, and you look at the grand picture of the world, everything else has a cycle so why not the human spirit?  So I started coming up with the idea that, okay there’s a spirit inside of me, and then there’s the body, and then I started reading books that validated those ideas, so that’s where it all started, as soon as I was able to read pretty much.

RD:      And how did it progress from there? When did you actually start giving readings and things for people?

KN:     Well after I played around with it- I’ve always had a sixth sense about it and I started doing readings probably 3 or 4 years ago as a side venture, up until that, just to make sure that I wasn’t telling people what I call “fluff”, you know that I was just telling them what I thought they wanted to hear, because its huge with me, I take it very seriously and it’s a passion of mine, so I want to make sure I’m giving the best readings I can.   I could just be making up garbage, but my reputation is at stake and I do want some validation.  About 5 or 6 years ago I met a psychic medium who was in a bookstore and I was talking to him, and we were attending a ghost hunter seminar, and he asked what kind of experiences I had, and I said well I sense and picture things when I walk into a room, and he said did you know you are sensitive? Which is another term for medium. And I said really? I always thought that, but he was the first one to prove it to me.  You don’t get that validation when you first get into this- people don’t tell you, but it’s an inherent ability.  Dogs have a sixth sense, cats have it - cats seem to react to the spirit world highly- you see cats freak out all the time.  We have it because it is how- going back many millennia, this is how primordial man survived; by instinct, or else how else would we know to eat that fruit?  So to make a long story short, after I felt validated I started playing around with friends, you know and doing readings for them, and they’re like, “you’re good, you should charge money”, and I thought you’re just saying that. I went for years doing them for free before I felt comfortable enough to charge.

RD:      You mentioned past lives, what is your attitude on reincarnation or karma?

KN:     Oh I totally believe in both, you know as someone who deals with the spirit world and actually has been through past life regression, and has done past live regression I believe that we have lived multiple lives, because really the soul or spirit of a person is really just an energy field, and everyone knows of Einstein’s Conservation of Energy theory- that energy cant be created or destroyed. It actually causes the muscles to move, it is the energy field within us, or else we are just a hollow shell.  So its all about energy and working with it.

RD:      How do you begin a reading if someone is to come to you, do they come to you and ask specifically, for example, “What was my past life?” Or…

KN:     Well the past lives are done differently. What I do is, I basically put the person into a guided meditation, and it puts them in a state almost like hypnosis.  I put them in a state of relaxation, they hear my voice and they are totally in control- and that’s one thing about it, that the person is always in control and can always come out as soon as they need to, if they get afraid or see something they don’t want to, you know versus the magic shows you see on TV where they make a guy cluck like a chicken, you know that’s just the power of suggestion, you know they are putting things into their head, but this is a light meditative state and I go through this meditation, where I have them essentially sitting in a movie theatre and ask them, “What do you see now?”, and they say “I see soldiers marching”, and I ask, “where are you, are you marching with them, are you standing on the side, what’s the environment around you?”  So by asking questions you get feedback, so basically it’s a question/answer period when they are in this meditative state.  When I’m doing a reading on the other hand, what I usually do is I’ll explain that I work with spirit guides from the other side, and I have 3 or 4 of them and I’ll tell them about what I sense around them, and I’m usually very good at getting a connection- I work very similar to John Edward, you know, to the side you have bro and sis, and up above mom and dad, above that is grandparents, its just kind of a reference point.  What I try to remind clients is that when they come to a reading, they can’t always hear from who they expect to and that’s a big misconception, that people are going to come to a reading and say I want to hear from my Uncle Frank—it doesn’t work that way, and I get people who are disappointed because Uncle Frank doesn’t come thru, so I try to tell people to be open minded and be accepting of anything, because there is a lesson in everything, and Uncle Frank might have other work to do on that day.

RD:   Speaking of open minded, do you find that some people are more susceptible, or that some people simply can’t consider the fact that there might be another plane of existence?

KN:     Well its usually a husband who comes to a reading with his wife, and he makes a comment at the end like, “there is no way you could’ve known that, because I just walked through the door”, and those are people who have just seen my website, or come to a psychic fair, and that’s when there are like, “this stuff is real”, and I hear people saying that and it seems to be mostly male, well there are just as many skeptical females too, its not divided by sex, so you’ll get a friend who was totally skeptical, and they are blown away, because they know he had never met me before, but here I come up with Uncle Freddy who used to own an ice cream shop in Flint, Michigan,  how would I know that, of all obscure facts.

RD:   Historically and religiously speaking, people seem to think that the spirit world or astral plane is “out there” somewhere separate from us, or is it-

KN:     Its all around us, it really is. In fact one of the ways I describe it is, every second that clicks off is a layer- we’re like the center of an onion, and it’s all around us, not necessarily here or there but everywhere.  You can have paranormal activity in the middle of the street- most people don’t want that, cause it’s a busy intersection.  Not that it happens, but it can, there’s no reason why it couldn’t.

RD:      What can you tell me about the crystals?

KN:     The crystals are clear quartz and they help me pick up the energy. They are receptive to different vibrations- every crystal responds to different vibrations.  In fact, pure quartz crystals are used in Hamm radios as well, You know the old time Hamm radio operators used quartz crystals, and they would shave them down thin, and the different sized crystals received different frequencies, so that’s an example of what they do, and realistically there’s something soothing about them- when I first started doing readings I didn’t need them, and I probably don’t need them now, but they put me in a zone and now it seems like I get better readings- whether it’s a visual thing, or vibrational enhancement I don’t know.

RD:      You mentioned that every body has its own magnetic field, obviously that’s true for any metal or mineral as well.

KN:     Yeah I mean you think about what it takes to actually make a quartz crystal, Years of the right chemistry and the right composition and the pressure, the tension. I mean think about how a diamond is formed.  It’s years of volcanic activity, it’s super heated and put under a ton of pressure, so there’s no way you can say it doesn’t contain energy, because it was created using energy. And they same thing with any crystal. If you work with crystals you’ll find that certain crystals have different characteristics, a lot of them vibrate to different frequencies.

RD:      Do you find that different geographic areas have different vibrational levels, such as the Upper Peninsula?

KN:     Oh yeah, oh yeah. Last year I came up for the first time to help set up the event, and the first night I got here I couldn’t sleep for anything.  Because you’ve got energy from the iron in the ground, you’ve got copper, you’ve got iron ore, you’ve got hematite, you’ve got the water- water is a great conductor of energy and just Lake Superior alone has a tremendous amount of energy, look at Friday when the lake was churning, I took video of the waves down by the black rocks, and you could feel the waves under your feet against the rocks.  So yeah, geographically, not so much in Detroit, but there’s a lot of energy up here, because the area, as I understand, geologically was part of an old volcanic system.  It’s the energy within the ground, doing readings up here are much easier.

RD:      Does it have anything to do with the air or atmosphere?

KN:     I think its easier to sense, because the air is cool and crispy, and down in Detroit, you’ve got housing and traffic and lights, and you’re bombarded with all this electronic interference, and up here you don’t have a cell phone tower every half mile, or thousands of electrical lines around you.  The air in general is cleaner and I feel much more grounded when I come up here.  I almost feel like I’m home when I’m here, you know its weird when you cross that bridge, you know, and you’re away from the Lower Peninsula and you’re like, “Aaaaaaaah!”

RD:      That’s what I felt when I moved here, it seems like it’s got its own magnetic center almost.

KN:     It does, and it’s a different type of energy and that’s got a lot to do with the lake, and you’re right, if it wasn’t for Wisconsin, the UP would pretty much be an island.

RD:      Are there any particular readings that stand out for you personally, I mean, you are dealing with the experiences of others, but you must be gaining a whole lot of perspective yourself?

KN:     Yeah, there’s ummm… What was really weird for me was last year when I came up here, I did a reading. It’s actually a testimony on my website, and I pretty much nailed every detail to a T, without knowing the history of the accident or what happened. It was a young male that had suddenly passed- that one I’ll always remember, because it didn’t seem like anybody at that session was getting a lot of information, but when I got to this particular person, there was so much information, like I had actually been at the scene.

RD:      That was last year at Crossings?

KN:     Yeah. And that one stands out from some of the others, because like I said, most of the time, for the first few years it was just a casual thing with friends, and I’d throw out some information, and find out *****later that it was true. Now I am getting more involved in the readings, but I don’t always recall the readings later, and a lot of it is I think, because you are so in tune with the energy, and when it leaves it takes it with.  And I actually keep closed all of my readings for client confidentiality, because there’s a lot of things that can come up in a reading that you don’t *****want to talk about, or just keep between—you know its kind of like a doctor/patient confidentiality agreement.

RD:      Fair enough. Okay, you talked about assisting someone with guided meditation, do you have to meditate yourself or go into a trance-like state to receive information?

KN:            Basically to receive the information- I experience the meditation, but I don’t go *****into the meditation.  Umm, but when I do readings I’ll open myself up prior, I’ll do some visualization, some energy work before my client gets here, and basically, as a medium, you pretty much have to turn on and turn off, otherwise its like 24/7 information. It’s like walking down a crowded street with headphones on tuned in between two different stations.  You learn as a medium, one of the most important things is to learn to shut it off when you’re not using it, so there is a process that most mediums go through.  When you work with the light, you’re also going to attract the dark, so you can get stuff coming in, particularly if you do a séance, and you don’t specifically say, “only those who want to get a message across or need help, come thru, and those who mean us harm, stay out, because you wont be tolerated.”  If you don’t specifically say something to that effect, then you attract unwanted stuff.  An example of attracting stuff you don’t want is people who play with ouija boards.  I don’t think they should even sell them as a toy! Because people are opening themselves up to the unexplained, and they don’t know how to handle it.  The whole ouija board started out as a Victorian parlor game by the spiritualists of the 1800s.  As professionals, they used it as a tool, and they knew how to open it up and close it down. But now people think you just take it out of the box, set it up, play around with it, then they leave it wide open, then the thing will drop temperature and they’ll get scared and put it away, and they leave that door wide open.

RD:      You think they’re just using it for thrills?

KN:     Right.  When we do a ghost investigation, where people are experiencing activity, one of the questions on the questionnaire is have you ever used a ouija board in the house, and 95% of the time the answer is yes, when there are experiencing something they don’t want.

RD:            Because they are unknowingly inviting anything into their home?

KN:     And it could be just someone brought one over to use it and they don’t know what there doing, how to protect themselves…

RD:      So are there really trickster entities out there who have nothing better to do than mess with our heads?

KN:     Yeah, I mean, I don’t necessarily believe in demons. I know- and it, its all about beliefs, I mean what I believe might not be your beliefs, or the guy on the street, or the super religious guy, but that’s what makes us individuals, it’s all about belief systems and being open minded, and I don’t necessarily believe in demons, but I do know that the spirit you have with you, and your demeanor on earth will follow you into the spirit world, so a lot of time someone might move into the house and sense this overbearing presence in this bedroom, its drives them nuts! And you got to think about it in the spirit world, when I go in as a medium; I ask, “Why is he upset?” He still lives in the house, and now someone new living here, and he doesn’t know he’s dead, or maybe he doesn’t want to accept the fact that he’s past on.  So then we try to work with the spirit and say, “you understand your past, you’re dead, move towards the light”, and we actually try to get them to progress towards the light.  A lot of time the energy will just keep building and building, and its because you don’t know what it is, you don’t know its this feeble old man who’s got dementia, and now there’s all these strange people in his house, and he’s upset, that’s what it comes downs to.

RD:      So are there many layers of existence between life and death, whereas, when you’re dealing with a lost soul, or a trapped soul, I mean, it sounds like you’ve got an entity stuck on one level, and where are you trying to lead them to exactly?

KN:     Well you’ll always hear, “Go to the light”, and it’s so pure. It’s such a powerful universal healing energy- it’s so brilliant, its white light. And yeah, there’s layers you have to go through, in time, and you always hear how spiritualism really started out is the tradition was to set a point for the loved ones to welcome them back, and the reason jack o lanterns came around was to scare away the unwelcome ones.  And in old religions, that’s when the veil is considered to be the thinnest-

RD:      In the autumn?

KN:     Yes, In the Wiccan faith that’s actually the New Year.  So yeah there are layers and there are doors and portals, and you hear about the vortex- like a hole that leads down into the center of the earth, and its more than a symbolic thing, because you’ll feel it, and people who are used to working with it will welcome it, but people who are not familiar with it will become dizzy or nauseous.

RD:            Because you’re dealing with an actual electromagnetic field, right?

KN:     Yeah, yeah essentially- its been proven that on ghost investigations, when you use and EMF reader- electromagnetic field detector- that extreme paranormal activity will always happen and manifests itself by taking energy from whatever source it can get, so a good indication is when the light bulbs will blow out- ever 3 weeks you’re changing bulbs.  Your batteries will die- say you use a digital camera and they’ll go dead, and then you leave the area and the charge will come back, so they’ll try to use any energy, and its been proven that high EMF readings can actually make people physically ill.  Like on the show ghost hunters, they did an investigation where this guy was always getting this creepy nauseous feeling- he got it on the stairs, so he always thought there was a ghost on the stairs, but under the stairs was this old electric panel with no cover and there were wires sticking out all over the place, and the EMF reading around there was like 98, so once the put the cover on there it dropped to 4.  He also had lots of chemicals and paint thinner, but the point is, there’s a lot of things that can give you the feeling, but I wanted to mention the EMF level, because the amount of energy leaking out in ours houses- if I had an EMF here in the hotel room and held it up to the outlet you’d see it spike.  They started out just for that, electricians used them to find hotspots, you know. So yeah it can make people feel physically ill, and when it gets to around 10 or 12, it can make you feel like you are being watched.  Like these people with old wiring and they always feel like they’re being watched.  So in doing investigations you learn to differentiate between different types of energy.

RD:      So what happens when you’re on an investigation, and you realize that you are dealing with a paranormal encounter, what’s the process of dealing with it?

KN:     One, you have to be careful, because a lot of people aren’t open to have a medium in the house- I mean, they want to know scientifically what we’re involved in, what we’re doing and how we do it.  So I’ll go into a room and sense a spirit, ill make it known, we’ll take temperatures readings, we’ll get audio recordings and turn on the infra red cameras.  Usually its hours of blank footage, but it’s the one time when you capture something- for example, we were on a house investigation, I think there were four of us, and as I was addressing the former owner of the house, one of the other investigators were taking a reading between my shoulder blades with an infra red thermometer, and the reading was dropping down to 48 degrees. The ambient room temp was in the 70’s but every time I talked about guy and mentioned his name it dropped to 48.  I worked with him for about 45 minutes and by the time I got done talking to the guy my hands were like ice cold. Then I felt the presence of a woman walk past into the kitchen, and just then a child’s toy turned on.  So that to me was a validation that she knew we were talking about her, that she wanted to make her presence known, and that’s where being open comes into play. So we’ll try to work with it and get some information, but only if the client wants us to.

RD:      Once you’ve gone on the ghost hunt, and you’re sure you’ve made contact, how do you work with it? Do you find yourself playing ghost shrink? Is there some kind of resolution that needs to happen?

KN:     It depends on the people who own the house, you know, a lot of people are like “well, he was here longer than us”, and a lot of time they just wanted to know it was there, and “as long as it doesn’t disturb us we’re okay”, but some people want it out, or they feel bad, cause here’s this poor little girl who’s been here for a hundred years, so yeah we’ll try to send them towards the light or help them grasp. Or there may be a reason why they’ve made contact.  A lot of time paranormal activity will be triggered by a family who might be receptive to the energy, and they are trying to get a message out for some reason.  I mean there’s been several cases of loved ones who past unexpectedly who come back to give some instruction as to where there last will and testament is, things like that.  I’ve read hundreds of books and that sort of thing is a common theme.  But sometimes they just want to be heard, and the message might not have anything to do with the family, and they feel bad, because they know the family doesn’t have anything to do with it.  Or say a mother and a daughter has a fight and it goes unresolved, so they come back and want to deal with it, and when you do the activity stops.  It can be anything that sets it off, an anniversary, a birthday, or near places where many lives were lost unexpectedly, like a battlefield.  That’s a residual haunting, and then you have grandpa that’s just checking in, that’s a visitation.  The ones who are stuck are called grounded, and usually its some tragedy that’s caused it.  You hear about a lot of it in England from its history- you hear a lot about grounded souls from the medieval times, because they died in deplorable conditions in a cell, and they’re just stuck, they have no chance of crossing over.

RD:      One other thing I wanted to ask- Carl Jung wrote a book on flying saucers, I don’t know if you’ve read that one, but there’s a lot of correlation between aliens or extraterrestrials, angels & demons, things like that.  He speculated that a UFO experience was an altered state of consciousness, that the entities existed in an alternate dimension or on another plane, and that we experience them psychologically when we enter their frequency, so to speak. There’s a history of a lot of UFO activity in the Upper Peninsula too, have you had any experience like that, or what’s your thoughts on extraterrestrials?

KN:     Umm, I’ve only had one UFO experience and haven’t seen any since, but its funny cause you’re the third person that’s asked me about that today, and I just watched about 3 hours on UFOs last night.  The thing about it is that my concept of UFOs is a little bit different than most peoples.  I do believe that there is intelligent life out there, but I believe that they are more like… again I’m going to refer to the energy, its all about universal energy and being tapped into energy- connected with the cosmic universe energy.  They are the ones who are the keepers of the energy, and you know they’re kind of like supreme beings, but not in terms of god or Jesus.

RD:      Just more advanced because they know how to use the energy?

KN:     Yeah, I believe their vehicles use some kind of energy that we haven’t discovered yet, in fact there are metals from the crash in Roswell, and the molecular structure is like nothing we’ve seen on earth, and its *****paper thin.  So they know how to use materials and stuff, but what I think is that they are supreme beings, and since they are familiar with the energy and use it to their advantage, they are the keepers of it, and there’s no such thing as coincidence, I mean to have something happen at the exact moment, you know its too astronomical. So these beings are somewhat responsible for the maintenance, I guess, it’s just my kind of belief, it may not be right.  But you look at the pyramids of the Egyptians and the Aztecs and they’re arranged in these massive geometrical patterns and it can’t be a coincidence.  So when you get into paranormal research there’s a lot to consider, you really have to keep an open mind.

Keith Norton will be in Marquette giving readings at the Crossings Metaphysical Fair on November 2^nd and 3^rd at the Landmark Inn.  For details, check crossingovermqt.com or Keith’s website:  www.voicesbeyond.net.